Can Michael Jackson’s legacy survive ‘Leaving Neverland?’

Pop icon Michael Jackson survived many allegations while he was alive, but will the King of Pop’s legacy be able to survive the disturbingly powerful documentary “Leaving Neverland?”

After all, it has bounced
back before. The superstar’s image was tarnished by allegations of sexual abuse
that shadowed him throughout much of his adult life and even stood trial on
child molestation charges in 2005, for which he was acquitted. His untimely
death in 2009 seemed to wash that stain away in an outpouring of public love
and a resurgence of sales of his always popular music.

Now, 10 years later, the
HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland” has aired detailed and disturbing stories
from two men who say Jackson groomed them for sex and molested them when they
were just little boys.

It has cast a spotlight on
Jackson’s unsavory history at a #MeToo moment when old allegations against
stars have been taking hold, and taking them down.

So far, there has been no
evidence of major damage to Jackson’s music or his estate, which has made an
estimated $2 billion since his death. His music has been featured in
commercials and is the subject of a Cirque Du Soleil show in Las Vegas. A play
about his life by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage is due out on Broadway
next year.

And it may not. After all,
Jackson is dead now, which means he can’t be charged or put on trial, keeping
the story in the headlines for months or years to come.

And there is Jackson’s
nearly unparalleled star status — starting out as a cherub-faced 11-year-old
sensation with the Jackson 5, then catapulting into a global phenomenon with
the world’s best-selling album of all time, “Thriller,” to his credit and hits
adored by multiple generations.

“It’s hard
to compare someone of Michael Jackson’s caliber to anyone else,” said Danny
Deraney, a publicist who often handles crisis management. “I don’t think we’ve
seen anything like it.”

Still, Oprah Winfrey, with
her vast influence, may have heralded a shift in public attitudes just by
hosting the special “After Neverland,” in which she interviewed the documentary’s
subjects, James Safechuck and Wade Robson.

“For me, this moment transcends Michael Jackson. It is much
bigger than any one person,” Winfrey said during an hourlong special that aired
after the conclusion of “Neverland” on Monday night. “This is a moment in time
that allows us to see this societal corruption.”

Winfrey, who revealed on her talk show more than 30 years
ago that she was sexually abused as a child, was joined by Wade Robson and
James Safechuck, the two accusers at the center of “Neverland,” and Dan Reed,
the film’s director. She praised Reed for his approach to the project.

“I taped 217 episodes [of “Oprah”] on sexual abuse. I tried
and tried and tried to get the message across to people that sexual abuse was
not just abuse. It was also sexual seduction,” Winfrey said, adding that Reed
was “able to illustrate in these four hours what I tried to explain in 217.”

“I hope we
can get beyond Michael Jackson the icon, stop staring into the sun, and do what
is necessary to help our children and ourselves,” Winfrey said in front of an
audience of sexual abuse survivors and their supporters.

She did not directly
condemn Jackson. But she praised the film, treated its assertions as truth, and
said that she was expecting an earful from Jackson’s defenders.

“I’m gonna get it,”
Winfrey, who interviewed Jackson before the allegations emerged in 1993 and his
family after his death, said at the end of the show that aired Sunday and
Monday on HBO and OWN just after the documentary.

And she did. Even before
the special taped, she was subject to fierce criticism by some who left disparaging
comments on her social media account.

It could be that Jackson’s
fandom is so pervasive, especially in countries that don’t follow his personal
news closely, that the documentary and renewed allegations will just make a
small dent.

“For Michael Jackson’s
fans, more so probably outside of America, I don’t think it will have an
effect, because they’ll ride or die with Michael,” Deraney said.

“Neverland” is largely made up of unflinching
testimony from Robson, 36, and Safechuck, 40, who both claim they were
befriended by Jackson and then sexually abused by him when they were children.

The 236-minute film also explores the trauma they say they
experienced as adults and features interviews with some of their family
members, including both of their mothers.

Robson, who claims the abuse
started when he was 7, and Safechuck, who claims it started when he was 10, had
previously told authorities there had been no sexual misconduct. Robson
testified in Jackson’s defense at the 2005 molestation trial. But they have
since filedlawsuits against the Jackson estate. They are appealing after their
suits were dismissed due to the statute of limitations.

Robson and Safechuck’s
allegations didn’t emerge until 2013, when they filed
lawsuits seeking
money from Jackson’s estate that have since been thrown out and are under
appeal. Both men had previously denied Jackson sexually abused them and had
been among his fiercest defenders when Jackson was alive, but say having their
own children and Jackson’s death led them to confront their truth.

Because of
the men’s past denials, some Jackson fans have dismissed their testimonies as
lies, motivated by money. Some even refused to watch the documentary. Still,
after the film began airing, there were casual fans who felt gutted by the
revelations, with some saying they could not listen to his music the same way —
if at all.

“People have already made
the decision one way or the other,” Deraney said. “I think when a lot of people
think of Michael Jackson they already think ‘pedophile,’ whether or not there
is any proof.”

Many millennials have only
vague knowledge of the Jackson accusations, and are shocked even by facts that
are acknowledged by both sides.

“I’m young enough to have
not been aware of the allegations about Michael Jackson as they were
happening,” 31-year-old New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie tweeted while
watching the documentary. “It is WILD TO ME that anyone thought his behavior
around and constant contact with young boys was remotely okay.”

Some of Jackson’s fellow
artists have indicated they will not give him and his influence up easily, and
say they can separate the performer from the person.

Jason Derulo recently
released the first music and videos from a planned boxed set of EPs that the
singer and dancer made in tribute to Jackson. It’s set to be released in its
entirety on June 25, the 10th anniversary of Jackson’s death.

“Michael was the sole
reason I started singing and dancing, so this was a way for me to give back,”
Derulo, who has not seen “Leaving Neverland,” told media outlets. “I started
this project because of my love of the performer that Michael Jackson is and
the influence that he had on my life as the best performer that ever lived.
This has nothing to do with anyone’s personal life.”

India.Arie says it was
right to speak out against R. Kelly, who faces new sexual abuse charges after
the Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” aired more than a decade after he
was cleared of child pornography charges. But Jackson’s situation is different,
the singer said.

“With R. Kelly there’s
video,” she said, referencing a sex tape that allegedly shows the singer’s
abuse. “With Michael Jackson, there’s a lot of speculation. I don’t know if
it’s going to go as far. … Not because we love him more, I just think it’s a
different situation.”

Jackson’s
defenders, including what the New York Times described as the singer’s “tenacious” legion of online
fans, assailed the documentary, deluging Twitter with disparaging
comments. They
say the documentary repeats discredited allegations from admitted liars.

Jackson’s brothers said they were already in a rough period of managing
his memory and legacy with their father Joseph Jackson’s death last year, when
they heard that “Leaving Neverland” was coming.

“This time is difficult
for us because you know Michael, coming up on the 10th anniversary of his
passing and my father passed away six months ago,” Marlon Jackson told media
outlets last week. “So those things are still there, and you never get rid of
them. You learn to live with them. And now we’re dealing with something that’s
totally different but has no truth to it. There’s no facts at all.”

Corey Feldman, the former child
star who was close friends with Jackson as a child and said in 2011 that pedophilia was “the No. 1 problem in
Hollywood,” appeared to suggest in a tweet that the allegations against
the King of Pop were false.

At least one
prominent and formerly devoted fan says he’s been forced to reconsider.

“Roughly an hour into
‘Leaving Neverland,’ it felt like my chest had caved in …. It wasn’t long
before I accepted that ‘Leaving Neverland’ would force me — and likely many
others who also feel a deep connection to Jackson’s work — to see that none of
us really knew him. And that maybe we’d been avoiding the truth.”

The subjects of the
documentary themselves don’t have strong feelings about whether people should
give up Jackson’s music.

“It’s a chance to
reevaluate who you want to be your idols,” Safechuck told media
outlets at Sundance.
“Because you can write a song, does that mean you should be people’s moral
compass? … It’s less about tearing down somebody and more about an
opportunity of who do we want to look up to.”

“There’s plenty of other
amazing people to fill that role.”

The Robson family, as seen in HBO’s Leaving Neverland, with Michael Jackson.

Most Disturbing Aspects of “Leaving
Neverland”

Jackson groomed families as well as his alleged victims.

Both Joy
Robson, Wade’s mother, and Stephanie Safechuck, James’ mom, say Jackson for a
time felt like another son to them. (Jackson met James when they starred in a
Pepsi commercial and Wade when the boy’s Jackson impersonation led to an
onstage appearance in Wade’s native Australia during the Bad tour.) He visited
both families’ homes and hosted them at homes he owned, including Neverland
Ranch. His childlike persona and, the documentary implies, the overwhelming
nature of his fame helped convince the families that Wade and James would be
safe in his company.

Neverland had multiple places
for Jackson to take his victims.

As Safechuck
tells it, Jackson’s Santa Barbara County property had several spaces where he
took the boy for sexual encounters, from a room adjacent to the main house’s
home theater to a bedroom above the theme park’s train stations. The hallway
leading to the singer’s bedroom had a series of bells that sounded if someone
was approaching.

Jackson sowed an us-against-them
mentality in the boys.

Robson and
Safechuck discuss at length how Jackson told them not trust other people —
women in particular — and that no one would understand their “love.”
He allegedly told the boys that they would go to jail along with Jackson if
anyone found out what they were doing. Safechuck also says he and Jackson would
practice “drills” about what to do if someone were to walk in on
them.

Jackson’s favored sexual
tactics.

Both men
describe a gradual escalation from touching to more involved acts. They allege
that Jackson preferred to have them kneel on hands and knees at one corner of
his bed while he masturbated from the opposite corner while looking at them.
Robson describes one such encounter where he would either have to look back at
Jackson or in front of him at a cutout of Peter Pan. Both allege he had them
perform oral sex on him and did the same to them; as they got older, he showed
them graphic pornography.

Jackson and Safechuck got “married.”

One of Leaving Neverland‘s most powerful moments comes about
90 minutes into part one, when Safechuck recounts how Jackson used the boy’s
love of jewelry against him, including buying him a wedding ring to cement
their commitment to one another. A visibly upset Safechuck shows the camera the
ring and other pieces he says Jackson gave him as rewards for sex. They would
go to jewelry stores on the pretense of buying something for a woman, Safechuck
alleges, using his smaller hand as a guide for size.

Jackson counted on both for
support in court cases.

Part two of Leaving Neverland spends a good amount of time on
two court cases against Jackson. As boys and, in Robson’s case, as an adult,
both said in legal proceedings that Jackson had never violated them. When
Jackson was accused of abusing boys in 1993 and 2003, he repeatedly called both
and pressed them to testify on his behalf. His lawyers subpoenaed Robson in the
2004-05 trial, where Robson again said Jackson had never acted inappropriately
with him. He tells director Dan Reed he wasn’t ready, emotionally or
psychologically, to speak the truth at that time.

It took years for Robson and
Safechuck to understand they were abused.

As Robson
put it, for years he believed that “I loved him and he loved me, and [sex]
was something that happened between us.” Safechuck told his mother of the
abuse in the days following the 2003 accusations against Jackson, when the
singer was pressuring the family to speak on his behalf. Robson took longer to
face up to the truth. Robson sued Jackson’s estate in 2013, but the case was
dismissed after a judge found he hadn’t filed it within the statute of
limitations.